


A Better Forever

by merrin



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Curtain Fic, Domestic, F/M, Happy Ending, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Trauma Recovery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-16
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-14 11:14:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28794510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merrin/pseuds/merrin
Summary: Even before he'd lost his leg in the games, Peeta would never have been someone who could challenge Katniss at hunting, joke with her in the Hob. It had always been different for him, he'd always wanted forever, but not the forever his parents had found. A better one. He'd never been jealous because Gale didn't have anything he wanted.
Relationships: Katniss Everdeen/Peeta Mellark
Comments: 6
Kudos: 16





	1. You Are Enough

**Author's Note:**

> This incorporates both movie and book canon, most notably because as much as I love both JLaw and Josh Hutcherson in their roles, their sizes are way off and I prefer the book. 
> 
> This series of connected shorts is based off a playlist I made for this pairing, which you can find here https://spoti.fi/3ilFRlD
> 
> (If this looks familiar it’s because I accidentally deleted the first post when I was trying to post the second chapter.)

Bright, shiny demons creep on the edge of his vision, becoming memories he’s absolutely certain of in that moment: Katniss in the arena killing Rue, Katniss orchestrating the attack on 12 that took his family, Katniss as a mutt, Katniss kneeling before Snow. All bright and shiny, more technicolor than even the Capital could have created. Sometimes they’re like memories of his memories, particular horrors his subconscious cooks up special. 

Peeta grips the back of the chair, breathing deeply like he was taught. In through his nose, out through his mouth. In through his nose, out through his mouth. 

It’s nothing but a few moments before the visions slip away, back into the dim corners of his mind. It’s a few moments more before Peeta opens his eyes to find Katniss, not bright and shiny but solid and real, her back against the wall but her hands up, gentle and sure. Not to fight but to be ready, as she always is, for him to collapse against her as the visions pass. She’s as slight as she ever was, even with regular meals, but she’s always been strong enough to catch him.

“The visions don’t seem to happen as frequently,” she says, voice muffled by his shoulder. 

“They don’t,” he agrees, and he’s sad about that in ways he can’t quite articulate. The one thing Peeta had never expected, if he’d been able to predict any of it, is how comforting the episodes are.

He tried to explain it to Dr. Aurelius once but he didn’t understand. “Why do you think that is?” he had asked. 

“Because I keep beating them,” Peeta had said, which was part of it but not the whole of it. He hasn’t been scared of losing control since that basement in the Capital, the night before everything ended. It took longer for the doctors to trust him than it took for him to trust himself, to release him to head back to 12. 

Each time is a little victory though, and he’s learned to take those where he can. 

He can hear the children outside the window, delighted screams as they chase each other around the yard, and the occasional honks of Haymitch’s geese. It’s another anchor in this time and place, in this reality and not the shiny one that invades his thoughts. “I was captured by the Capital during the Quarter Quell,” he says. Snow had used the word rescued and made Peeta believe that Katniss was dangerous, that she’d orchestrated the whole thing, that she--

“Real,” Katniss answers him. 

“I was tortured.” Not with broken bones or whips, like they’d whipped Gale (real or not real?) but with memories that aren’t his, that can’t be his. 

“Real.” 

“Gale rescued me.” That memory has never been tainted, obviously, but it never hurts to check. He hates to think about it being Katniss at his cell that night instead. Would he have managed to kill her? Just a small team with her and none of them with a syringe of the knock-out drugs they had in 13. 

Katniss’s arms tighten around him. “Real,” she says. 

Peeta squeezes her right back, breathless with joy for just a moment. His memories might not always be his own but it’s a damn sight better than he ever thought he’d get. He wonders who does this for Annie with Finnick gone, if she still has problems sorting fact from fiction. He doesn’t have to wonder what he’d do without Katniss; he knows he wouldn’t be alive without her. Annie is strong in ways he just isn’t. 

“We have a good life now,” he says, to chase those shadows away but mostly just to see what she’ll say, and he’s pleased when she tips her head back to smile up at him. “Real,” she says. 

He kisses her forehead, content just to hold on for now. “It all seems better after one of these,” he says, wondering if she’ll get it. 

“It’s waking up from a nightmare,” she says, “but that’s not why you like them.” 

“Who says I do?” 

She just looks at him. “It all really happened, and we survived. And you like remembering that you are strong and good enough to survive.” 

He did, he does. “You’re the strong one,” he says. “I never would have made it without you.” 

“I wouldn’t have made it without you either.”

He sighs and smiles. He likes that she says it, he likes that she might even believe it, but he likes even more that it isn’t true. There’s a peace for him in knowing that no matter what happens, she’ll carry on. It’s best knowing that she doesn’t have to. 

Later, after dinner and bathtime and stories and the children are sleeping, in the quiet of their bedroom, lit only by the flicker of a candle, Katniss whispers, “This is enough, right? This life?” 

“Real,” he whispers back. “More than.”


	2. This Is Not the End

_If it be your will to speak  
Of memories we often shared  
Talk to me of days gone by  
Think of love and not despair_

Not all of their memories are happy ones, but they try not to dwell on those.

It takes Katniss a long time to be able to think about Prim without falling into blackness. It always starts simple, the bleating of a goat reminds her of Lady, which reminds her of Prim’s first attempts at milking, which makes her laugh at the memory of the disgust on Prim’s face. Prim’s face. Prim’s face as Katniss called to her. Then flames. Then nothing.

Katniss has lost entire days to this spiral. 

Peeta’s no better. It’s as difficult to track his triggers as it is her own. More so, since they don’t have a list of the memories the Capital implanted. At least Katniss knows her thoughts are hers alone. It doesn’t scare her anymore when Peeta grasps at the bed frame, knuckles white against the worn brass. She trusts his control more than she does hers. 

It helps when they make the book. Peeta has few memories of Finnick that aren’t tinged with something horrible, like the arena or the assault on the Capital, but what he talks about are the sugar cubes and Finnick saving his life, and he only has to stop once to gasp into his hands. He talks about the career pack in the first games, able to add things Katniss never knew about, quiet moments between Clove and Cato that she’d never seen. 

The page about Mitchell, somehow the only person Peeta killed during any of the Games, is short. They hadn’t known him well before he’d fallen victim to Peeta’s hijacked self-control. Still, he’d once been the best sharpshooter in Panem, and should be remembered. 

Katniss does Rue’s page all in a rush in one afternoon, and Peeta stays up with her all night, holding her, singing songs into the darkness with her, anything to keep the nightmares at bay. 

If they were both still calling Dr. Aurelius, he’d probably tell them that writing down their triggers and nightmares helped to process them. For Katniss, it’s like putting all of the bad things in a box in a closet so she doesn’t have to think about them anymore because those thoughts are being held for her. Either way, it helps.

The uneasy truce she had formed with Buttercup while living in close quarters in 13 continues, though she leaves most of his care to Peeta. Like most living organisms, Buttercup likes Peeta more than Katniss anyway. 

Peeta frames out a raised bed garden in the green space in front of the house. Katniss helps him square the lumber and he tells her about the garden his father made his mother in their backyard in town, the spices he’d plant to use at the bakery. That garden is lost under the rubble now, rich, loamy dirt choked with ash. 

They don’t plant any spices, not at first. Instead, they plant juicy tomatoes and green and yellow squash, watermelons they eat warm straight off the vine, spitting the seeds carefully into cups for the next crop. Greasy Sae teaches Katniss how to preserve the produce for the winter months and she starts to stock the cellar. She runs her fingers over the jars on the shelves and thinks of the soggy bread Peeta had thrown to her, the first food they’d eaten in days. She wishes Prim had lived to see such abundance. Peeta finds her there later, clutching cans of beans and when he folds her into his arms she can’t explain to him why she’s crying, but she thinks he knows. 

They plant primrose every spring. Not in the beds, but close around the house, under all the windows and close against the porch. It blooms all through the summer months, little clusters of pinks and yellows and purples, a riot of color and a delicate, innocent scent that tickles Katniss’s nose as they watch the sunset. 

It’s several years of Reaping Day anniversaries before Katniss doesn’t wake up screaming, dreaming of Prim’s name being called, of being frozen in place and not able to volunteer. Peeta holds her as she cries, loud gasping sobs that Greasy Sae can probably hear from her house. Even after the nightmares stop, they’re never able to treat it as just another day, and she doesn’t think any of them would want to. Peeta makes a special dinner, and Haymitch takes a break from his geese, and they’ll flip through the book if they can bear it. Somehow, it gets easier every year. 

Katniss never truly finds forgiveness with her mother, but she understands the sucking blackness of her grief better and they come to a sort of peace. Katniss calls her occasionally, a little more frequently as time goes on. Too much has broken in both of them to ever be able to support each other again, but for reasons she can’t quite articulate, there’s still a comfort in discussing the day to day with her. 

Peeta keeps in touch with more folks, but regularly calls Johanna, who ended up back home in 7 after everything. Her torture at the Capital’s hands was different than Peeta’s, but the connection is still there. He seems lighter after those phone calls, like sharing the emotional burden is also sharing a physical weight between them. 

It’s years after the whole thing fell apart that Peeta and Greasy Sae wrestle a goat into a hastily built pen around Greasy Sae’s house. Katniss comes down the lane at the commotion and stops just outside the yard. The goat looks nothing like Lady, who Katniss assumes either escaped to run wild in the forest or died in the bombing that drove the residents of 12 to the caverns of 13. But they sound the same. Her bleats have the same cadence as Lady’s and Katniss is surprised to discover that it’s fine. That the sucking darkness that used to lie in wait for her around every corner has gone, that she can think of Prim and not fall into despair. 

There’s a sadness there when she pokes at it that she knows will always live inside her, but it’s grown easier to bear with time. She can think of Prim, eternally young (though the years have started to take their toll on Katniss), and only remember how much she loved her. 

She scritches the goat between the ears and laughs as it nibbles at the seam of her shirt. And then she takes Peeta’s hand and heads home.


	3. If Not Now

_I may never see the promised land.  
I may never see the promised land.  
And yet we'll take the journey  
And walk it hand in hand  
If not now, tell me when._

There’s a letter from Gale on the afternoon train. Peeta takes the delivery from the Crobbet kids and balances the letter on the hook where Katniss hangs her hunting coat before setting himself to the task of putting away the shipment of food and supplies. 

He’s in the middle of rolling out biscuits for dinner when she comes in. For someone who can stalk a deer silently for miles, she’s never quiet when she comes through their front door. The game bag crashes to the floor beneath the hook and her boots drop one, then the other beside it. He can hear her pause when she sees the letter though, and she comes into the kitchen still shrugging out of her coat, letting it fall to the floor as she tears into the envelope. 

Peeta steps around her to gather her jacket from the floor. “What’s the news?” he asks as he leans out the kitchen door to hang her coat up.

Katniss slumps over the table, propping her elbows up in the flour Peeta scattered over it. He’s pretty sure she doesn’t notice at all. “He’s getting married,” she says quickly, still scanning the letter. 

“To who?” 

She just gestures for him to wait. “He wants me to come,” she says, wilting down into a chair. 

Through his years of pining over every glimpse of her, Peeta had never really felt jealous of what she had with Gale. What he’d wanted with Katniss wasn’t what she and Gale had ever had. Gale had been her best friend, her brother, her antagonist at times. He pushed her and challenged her, and the Everdeens would have starved without him. A part of who she is will always be thanks to Gale, and Peeta could never begrudge that.

It’s better, he thinks, that Katniss had Gale before the Games. Gale had toughened her almost as much as losing her father had.

Even before he’d lost his leg in the games, Peeta would never be someone who could challenge Katniss at hunting, joke with her in the Hob. It had always been different for him, he’d always wanted forever, but not the forever his parents had found. A better one. He’d never been jealous because Gale didn’t have anything he wanted. 

Not that he begrudges Gale the jealousy that plagued him until Katniss left the Capital. Gale had spent most of his life expecting he and Katniss would eventually marry. Everyone in the Seam certainly had. 

But something was irrevocably broken by Prim’s death, by Gale’s idea about a two-stage bomb, something vital and important that Katniss would never be able to put together again, something that Gale continued to break, even from the safety of District 2. 

“So who’s the girl?”

Katniss shoves the letter toward him, but he doesn’t pick it up. “Some girl he’s met from 6.” 

“Do you want to go?” he asks her, handing her a biscuit from the first batch, warm and fresh from the oven. 

She starts to pick it apart as she answers. “It doesn’t matter, I can’t.” 

The terms of her release from the Capital were clear. She’s exiled to 12, until Paylor deems it the right time to pardon her. With all the want in the world, the train would never take her anywhere.

“But do you want to?” 

She shoves a few bites of biscuit into her mouth while she thinks. “I’d like to see some people again, but no.” 

“Maybe we can invite some people here.” 

She looks around their kitchen, as if trying to picture who she’d want in it. “Maybe,” she says. 

Peeta puts his hands over hers and the crumbs of the biscuit scatter in the spread flour. “We don’t have to invite Gale,” he says. 

She turns her hands in his, catching his fingers with her own. “How do you do that?” she asks. 

“Do what?”

“Answer questions I don’t even know how to ask.” She scowls, wrinkling her nose and he can’t help but laugh (gently, so she doesn’t bristle further) at how ferocious she doesn’t look. 

“It’s just,” she starts, dropping one of his hands to rub at her forehead. “When I see him again, I need it to be neutral ground. Somewhere she . . . wasn’t.” 

Peeta remembers the crack of the lash, Gale spread on the table while Prim and their mother packed poultices of herbs and snow on his back. “We can figure that out,” he says. 

“I’m stuck here.” 

“Not forever though.” 

She brings their joined hands to her face, kissing his knuckles before resting her cheek against them. He doesn’t want to spend his life at odds with Katniss, pushing her and challenging her. She’s had enough of walking through fire to prove herself. If Peeta’s forever is simply to be the calm center of her storm, that’s better than he thought he’d get. 

It’s better, he thinks, that Katniss has him for life after the Games. To offer her comfort and hope and warm biscuits. 

Before the breaking of Panem, he’d expected to live and die in 12. With the whole world open to him now, he’d choose to be wherever Katniss is.

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks to swaps55 for cheerleading and betaing.


End file.
